Cold War humanitarians

Overview & Synopsis

Humanitarian NGOs often disagree on the boundaries of their role and take vastly different views about what constitutes an ethical response to distant suffering. This book shows that, in the 1980s, decisions about when to adopt elements of human rights advocacy were fundamentally contested according to Cold War positionalities. Moreover, different underlying conceptions of rights were evident when humanitarians clashed over how to narrate suffering for Western audiences, when to speak out about atrocities witnessed by staff, and the material entitlements of aid recipients. Informed by the conviction that humanitarian NGOs must be examined as products of their national political cultures, this book compares the opposing decision-making patterns of two globally influential European NGOs – the French Médecins Sans Frontières and the British Oxfam – across three Cold War crises, namely the Cambodian refugee settlements and situation within post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia, the Ethiopian famine, and displacement from the Salvadoran civil war. While MSF’s work in this decade was animated by anti-communism and a commitment to advocating for the rights of individuals against state oppression, Oxfam’s was fuelled by a moral opposition to the excesses of Western foreign policy and a developmentalist orientation that emphasised the rights of people to have their basic needs met, leading the NGO to partner with states in pursuit of poverty reduction in the Global South. By excavating the social structures within which the NGOs’ identities were formed, this book shows that humanitarian actions (and silences) were political acts that influenced post-Cold War rights discourses in distinct ways.